Blog - Kitchen Saga

<sigh>

So a couple of weeks ago I decided to get the kitchen ordered, which was a nice thing to do as the house is just about finished apart from a bit of carpet and the kitchen fitting. I went down to IKEA at 9pm, thinking it’d be quiet, and mercifully it was (having spent 20 minutes just trying to park there the previous Saturday I didn’t fancy going through that again!).

I made my way through to the kitchen bit and stood at the desk until a young lady came and asked if she could help. I told her I wanted to order a kitchen and she seemed to know what she was doing.

[ As an aside, it’s possible to design an IKEA kitchen using their interactive planner tool, and the tool will even upload the plan to a server at IKEA so you can access it in the shop. The tool also generates the parts list and prices, so I asked the girl if she wanted to download my plan off t’Internet so save her typing it in. Anyways, it turns out there’s no way they can actually use the files to make an order, they still have to print it and then type it all into their own system by hand. This seems stupidly un-necessary to me, surely they could both be set up to use a bit of XML and save the kitchen staff some tedious data entry and possible errors? ]

The order went in OK apart from the cooker hood I’d chosen was discontinued (despite it still being on show on the wall, and in fact it’s still there 3 weeks further on). She gave me a delivery date of the 20th, i.e. yesterday, as the cookers come from Phillips and there was a lead time on that. She gave me a fistfull of paperwork and told me to take it to the checkout.

So I wandered down to the checkout and the lad on the till clearly had no idea what he was supposed to be doing with the paperwork I gave him, but the supervisor did and told me it had all gone though OK.

Now, I’d be told that someone would ring me before the 20th to give a time of day for delivery. Come Tuesday afernoon I’d not heard anything, so I rang them to get a time. I gave them my name and post code and they said there was no record of an order for that name.

Bum.

So I got a number for customer services who also couldn’t find a record of my order and told me that my best bet was to go down to the shop, which I did after work.

I marched all the way back round to the kichen desk to look for the nice young girl who’d placed the order, unfortunately there was just a chubby man with a beard called Jim. Jim had a look on his puter and told me that my order didn’t exist, then he goes ‘did you order it after 5pm?’, ‘Um, yes, why?’ and he got a slightly pained look on his face.

It turns out that they can’t actually place an order after 5pm and the paperwork has to be sent somewhere else the next morning, except mine never was. So basically I’ve got to wait another 3 weeks now until it’s delivered, which is a bit depressing. Beardy Jim also said that this happened ‘regularly’. I think he thought I was going to shout at him but since it really doesn’t matter I didn’t see the point.

The moral of the story is, don’t order a kitchen in IKEA after 5pm! Or if you do at least ring the next day and get an order number!

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 21st, 2006 at 5:44 pm and is filed under House. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.